I won’t share extensive notes here about the Femhack gathering on Autonomous Infrastructures as Feminist Practices, because I contributed to the more detailed piratepad notes. You can also read a shorter report on the gathering on the Femhack wiki.

It was an interesting event which drew some important connections between feminist hacking practices, anti-capitalism, and different conceptions of infrastructure, so I highly recommend checking out the notes.

I’ve been trying, lately, to fill the terrible holes in my knowledge that were left by my degree. I studied political science and international relations at a pretty conservative department. This has given me a strong grounding in stuff like, ‘classical liberal thinkers who happen to be mostly white men (and Mary Wollestonecraft for ‘diversity’) who I find deeply unsatisfying’, and a very poor grounding in more radical theories.

I’ve been reading bell hooks, and Sandra Harding, and anarchafeminist authors, and trying to find theories and frameworks that both mesh with my experiences of the world and challenge me to think more deeply about structures of oppression, and possibilities for liberation.

The problem is, I’m still reading within the framework I’ve been trained in. I was reading bell hooks’ Where we stand: class matters, and taking notes for a paper I’m working on. Then I realised there was a pattern to my note-taking. I was marking, for example, passages like this:

From the onset, there has been a struggle within feminist movement between the reformist model of liberation, which basically demands equal rights for women within the existing class struggle, and more radical and/or revolutionary models, which call for fundamental change in the existing structure so that models of mutuality and equality can replace old paradigms. (101)

Passages that are abstract and theoretical, that I can take and apply neatly to the writing I’m currently doing, bolstering the argument I want to make about the need for something beyond liberal feminism.

At the same time, I caught myself skimming over hooks’ descriptions of her own experiences as a Black woman within the feminist movement. I skipped over her descriptions of having white women talk over her in women’s studies classes or feminist spaces, being patronised, and being shouted over during discussions. I took the parts of her argument that felt like they fit (the need to talk about class, the need to mention race at least in passing, the need to call for more revolutionary forms of feminism) and discarded the parts that didn’t seem relevant (most importantly, hooks’ centering of her experiences as a Black woman as a grounding for her theory).

This is just what I was taught to do at university: to discard the personal in favour of abstract theory, and in particular to marginalise the perspectives of women and people of colour. Of course, this was never done overtly: we would take about race and class, but then get back to reading the works of white men who wrote ‘objectively’, as if their own experiences were irrelevant (and, at the same time, universal).

At times, this tendency towards taking parts of a theory while discarding others has been a form of resistance. In a space where most of the theoretical frameworks I was provided with felt terribly broken, I learned to cobble together the bits and pieces that seemed least broken to try to make something I could live with and use. That strategy has been important to me in the past, and will continue to be when I’m dealing with theory built on the experiences of privileged people. But it’s a form of erasure when it means sidelining racism and other forms of oppression I don’t experience.

It will take work to undo this. It will take work to find theorists who shift me in new directions. It will take work to notice, and undo, habits of reading and writing and research that reinforce the status quo. I’m noticing, more, how often white feminist academic and activist writing seems to mention intersectionality without acknowleding the foundational work by Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, the Combahee River Collective. I’m noting how often white feminists talk about ‘intersectionality’ while continuing to centre the experiences of white, middle-class (or elite) women, sometimes not even mentioning race at all. I am noticing more the ways in which I do this myself.

I am, of course, not the only person noticing these issues. Bell hooks’ writing makes it very clear that she has been seeing this process of erasure for decades; Sirma Bilge has published on the depoliticization of intersectionality; Black, Afroindigenous and women of colour have challenged the ways their theorising and organising are attacked online; and frankly I am probably missing a whole bunch of excellent writing on this topic because I am still working to find it.

This process of realisation I’m going through has happened in large part because of social media. I’m learning from the frequently-unwaged labour referred to in #thistweetcalledmyback, work by women of colour who engage in debates that are often incredibly wearing and destructive for them. And, in writing about this here, I’m hoping to make a small contribution to other people’s (particularly white, university-educated people’s) process of learning also: to notice our research processes, to do better, to try to centre experiences beyond our own.

Open technology and open culture is important to me. Free and open source software is vital to my research work, and as a researcher and an educator, I do what I can to support open access to important materials. Open culture and technology help support a more equal society, making key tools and information available to those who would not otherwise be able to access them.

But the culture around ‘open’ is, in important senses, still not that equal or that open. Recent discussions about aggression within the Linux development community have highlighted the ways in which particular kinds of language and interactions can work to exclude women and other people who are not brought up to interact aggressively, or who tend to be penalised for ‘assertive behaviour’ (including black men). Issues such as this are, perhaps, one of the reasons that women are underrepresented in most (but not all!) free and open source software communities. Women are also underrepresented in the supposedly open and meritocratic field of academia, at least in more secure positions: women are more likely to work in insecure, poorly-paid sessional positions (which contributes to their lack of time for publishing). On Wikipedia, women’s contributions to the world tend to receive relatively limited coverage, and women are underrepresented as contributors (happily there are efforts underway to change that).

I donated to The Ada Initiative, as well as volunteering on the advisory board, because I want to see more women in open technology and open culture. More than that, though: I want to see the culture around ‘openness’ change. I want to go to conferences with clear codes of conduct and diverse speaker lineups (which means more than a better gender balance). I want to go to more events like AdaCamp, which connect women with different perspectives and life experiences. I want technology that meets the needs of people other than the privileged (and I’m not sure that’s best done through any kind of ‘business model’). I want to help build ‘open’ spaces that actively engage with questions about how gender, class, sexuality, disability and race affect open culture and technology.

The Ada Initiative is making important contributions to this, including by modelling good practices for accessible events; supporting diverse participation at AdaCamp through the selection process and with travel grants; and providing a space for allies. If you can afford to donate, you’d help The Ada Initiative to run more AdaCamps, build resources for event coordinators, do important research on diversity in open technology and culture, and support gender diversity initiatives.

Want to read why others donated?

Sarah Sharp donated in part because AdaCamp helped her to recognise her own ‘impostor syndrome’.

Selena Deckelmann writes about how the networks formed at AdaCamp are reshaping her work.

Liz Henry supports the ways in which The Ada Initiative makes women in different open tech and culture communities visible to each other.

Connie Berardi says that AdaCamp can have lifechanging effects, as can other work supporting women in open technology and culture.

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